The State Supreme Court in the southern US state of Louisiana, on April 26, gave the city of St. George the right to secede from the larger capital city of Baton Rouge. This has cleared the way for a group of wealthy white Baton Rouge residents to carve out a majority-white enclave of the largely Black city—recalling the history in the US of segregation and white flight.
Wealthy, white residents of Baton Rouge have been trying to secede from the rest of the city in some shape or form for over a decade. In 2012, a group of parents went to the state legislature to propose the creation of a separate school district which they called the Southeast Community School District. This effort failed, but the following year they tried once again and also failed.
After these defeats, they began to adopt a new strategy: form an entirely separate city. This would ensure their children would not attend school with the rest of the Baton Rouge community. This strategy went through several failed attempts for years until this year, when the state’s Supreme Court finally ruled in favor of carving out the majority-white enclave of St. George into a separate city.
“St. George was born from the effort to create a local independent school district in the southeastern part of East Baton Rouge Parish,” states the website of the newly incorporated city of St. George. “We have witnessed the further decline of our public school system, skyrocketing murder and crime rates, further decay of our Parish infrastructure, unprecedented exodus of our friends and families from the Parish, and a complete lack of trust in our City-Parish leadership.”
Re-segregation
Laramie Griffin, a lifelong resident of Baton Rouge and a community organizer, calls the St. George split “neo-segregation”.
“This is essentially a land-grab, a money-grab that will decimate the city of Baton Rouge,” Griffin said. It is estimated that Baton Rouge will lose around USD 48 million in tax revenue that wealthy St. George residents would have otherwise brought into the city. Griffin mentioned cities such as Zachary and Baker, where wealthy white residents also chose to separate their school districts from the larger East Baton Rouge Parish school district.
The schools of Baton Rouge operated under a desegregation order as a result of the 1956 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling, which established that the segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. The ruling was viewed as a major victory of the civil rights movement. Baton Rouge was subjected to such an order longer than any school district in the country, which was finally lifted in 2003. The school district is now 81% Black and 89% of students are not white.
The St. George split would effectively re-create a segregated school system, turning the social clock back to before the victories of the Civil Rights movement.
“The St. George plan poses significant risks to our education system, threatens the continuity of critical programs, and challenges community representation,” writes the Baton Rouge chapter of the NAACP. “The creation of a new municipality introduces considerable uncertainty around funding allocation for our schools, jeopardizing the cornerstone of our community’s future: education.”
This is not the first time wealthy, white residents in the US South have successfully split off from larger cities to form independent school districts. Similar efforts in Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana have proven to lead to more segregation in schools.
Opponents of the split within Baton Rouge argue that the split, like many other historical examples of white flight, would deprive the city of the tax revenue generated by its wealthiest residents. The effects of white flight historically are felt throughout the country, including through the various water crises in the Mississippi capital of Jackson.
After schools in Jackson were desegregated in the ‘70s and ‘80s, white residents left the city en masse. By 1990, although Jackson’s population grew to 196,637, the city was only 44% white, a decrease of about 6,000 white residents. Their departure meant a significant decrease in public funding as they constituted a large portion of the wealthy tax base, because white people are historically more well-off than descendants of Black slaves in the US who suffer from systemic and structural racism and discrimination in regions across the country. In the US South where labor legislation is particularly weak and union density is low, Black workers are also super-exploited and under paid.
In Jackson, the decrease in funding for public services ultimately resulted in a broken water system, leaving the city without drinkable water in several rounds of crisis.
Cementing historic inequality
Griffin founded a nonprofit organization called EVOLVE Louisiana, which in part pledges to “rebuild impoverished communities.” Griffin denounced the organizers of the St. George split for wanting to move away from what wealthy white residents labeled as high crime rates, rather than give back to their communities.
“If you live here in the capital city and have a problem, wouldn’t you want to fix it, do what we call preventative care to prevent these things from happening?” Rather than use their tax dollars to provide housing or other social services to prevent crimes, Griffin denounces St. George residents for wanting to “separate themselves.”
Baton Rouge does have higher violent crime rates than the rest of the nation. However, with the elimination of a major source of funding for the city’s public services in the form of taxes, crime could only get worse, as research has proven the links between poverty, few economic opportunities, and crime. The median household income of Baton Rouge was $50,155 between 2018 and 2022, far lower than the national MHI of $74,580.
For many years, Baton Rouge has been plagued by race-based income inequality, with Black households seeing some of the lowest earnings. The poverty rate of Baton Rouge is 15.3%, higher than the national average of 12.6%. The most common racial grouping living below the poverty line is Black. Income inequality in East Baton Rouge Parish, the larger governing body which contains Baton Rouge, has been steadily rising for the past decade.
